10 reasons to
consider
Kentico as
your next CMS

At Fresh Egg, we like to keep our offering – you guessed it – fresh, so we’re always looking for new ways to streamline our approach and become more efficient to better serve our clients. Saving time (and money), whilst still delivering a first-class website is the dream of any digital agency, and our partnership with award-winning all-in-one web system Kentico allows us to do just this.

Kentico is a versatile web content management system for building feature-rich business websites, ecommerce stores, and intranets. Kentico CMS uses ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server for development via its Portal Engine, using Visual Studio, or through Microsoft MVC. Kentico is compatible with Microsoft Azure. Keep reading and discover more about this versatile platform.

"With Kentico, we’re able to offer businesses a feature-rich web proposition that shortens required development time, a win-win for everyone"

Stephen Carpenter, head of development and design

1. Shares similar CRM features with Hubspot
2. Marketing automation
3. Inbuilt A/B testing
4. Integrated campaign management
5. The price is right
6. Multivariate functionality
7. One-click registration with social media login
8. Integrated email marketing
9. No GDPR headaches
10. A powerful (and very useful) lead scoring system
11. Bonus! Provides a tailored experience with fully integrated onsite personalisation

HubSpot’s a great CRM, those that use it, swear by it. But you still have to use third-party tools for some functions such as A/B and Multivariate testing. With Kentico, you don’t – it has key functionality right out of the box:

Kentico offers a great many features that HubSpot does, and then some – all in one single place. Nice and simple, including:

• Fully customisable Web Content Management System (CMS).
• E-commerce platform.
• Online marketing capabilities – web analytics, lead scoring, personalisation, and marketing automation.
• Internal intranet and workgroup collaboration solution.

As far as marketing automation tools go, Kentico’s application is really smart. Site administrators can automate, optimise and analyse campaigns that nurture visitors through intelligent sales funnels and categorise them into prospects or warm leads.

Working with both manual and automated condition-based triggers to shape the journey of different users, the system responds and reacts to user activity, creating limitless possibilities for personalisation which will bring many marketers amazing new possibilities of connecting with key audiences.

For example, let’s say a visitor has watched a range of videos on how web widgets are made and how to get a custom red widget built for their own site. The system will identify this user as a warmer lead due to the interest shown, and trigger an increased user score. Then, providing the user has consented to receive marketing information, the system will automatically send a personalised and time-sensitive offer to that user to progress them to the purchase stage of the journey. If they buy, they’re taken down a further path of automation to purchase accessories or aftercare, and if no purchase occurs, the user score is reduced and they’re introduced into a different funnel to nurture them back to becoming a warmer lead again.

Put simply, it’s about understanding where the user is in their journey, what they’re looking for and responding to their need at just the right time – a strategy very central to everything we do here at Fresh Egg, with our Experience Design and Customer Experience Journey Mapping (CXJM).

The saying goes, ‘Three’s a crowd’, right? So, it’s a good job you don’t have to integrate third-party tools into the Kentico system in order to get the best from it.

With full A/B testing functionality already built-in, there’s no need for developers to get involved deploying extra code from other platforms, which means an altogether cleaner and quicker route to getting tests live (following a CRO Test Plan of course). With Kentico, A/B testing is an element the marketing team can own.

Kentico’s A/B testing functionality offers marketers the ability to:

• Test an unlimited number of page variants
• Find designs and messages that lead to improved conversions
• Not being reliant on external applications to measure success
• Real-time monitoring of tests
• Optimise without routing through developers

Testing pages is a simple task within Kentico and doable with less front-end dev support. Marketers can set up variants, deploy, monitor, and report from the easy-to-use system.

Don’t get us wrong - as much as we love developers (they really are a lovely bunch), anything that reduces their time on a project means money saved for you, and time saved for us – so it really is a win-win all-round.

Not only is Kentico a powerful feature-rich CMS, but it also has an inbuilt campaign management platform too.

So, you can set up, monitor and manage marketing campaigns all from one place. You can log traffic generated from display ads, marketing emails or social media, and track the actions performed by users who arrive on your site as a result of those campaigns.

For example, you could set up a campaign to track how many visitors download a whitepaper from a specific page after you’ve sent them a promotion email advertising the content, and set alerts when those visitors become warm leads for your sales team to contact.

At Fresh Egg providing value for our clients is always our priority, and we’re pleased that Kentico is available at a very competitive price point for a feature-rich off-the-shelf solution.

Kentico is a first-class CMS system with a host of benefits:

• Quick and easy to use
• Scalable, customisable and extensible
• Integrates easily across your business
• Make updates any location, at any time
• Support and 7-day bug-fix policy
• First-class security
• Unparalleled out of the box functionality
• Quick to market product
• Ongoing product development with a visible roadmap

Complementing the A/B testing and personalisation features is multivariate testing (MVT). This form of testing is used to test multiple changes to a page, i.e. a higher number of variables at any one time.

Using this functionality the web team can optimise several web parts and web part zone components including layout, formatting and widgets within a page, and monitoring the success of the tests is easy too – without the need for developer intervention. Once trained, marketers can perform MVT testing as and when required.

With user experience at its heart and no time for the ‘what’s my password’ faff, Kentico uses built-in social connectors to allow visitors to register with one click using their most-used social media accounts.

Supporting Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft Live ID, and Open ID account types, the user information collected is then used by Kentico’s intelligent personalisation platform to serve a better experience in and around the site.

In today’s ‘at-need’ world, one-click social login functionality reduces friction for your users and delivers a stronger customer experience.

Create, manage and send out engaging and impactful marketing emails via the dedicated email application within Kentico.

The platform supports automation via two types of email output (campaigns and newsletters) to give you a direct line into your customer’s inbox giving ownership to the marketing team to…

• Create newsletters
• Create email campaigns
• Write marketing emails
• Send marketing emails
• Manage recipients
• Track and monitor marketing emails

For email campaigns the system allows marketers to target and retarget every marketing email based on the impact of the previous email communication. Kentico also empowers marketers by enabling the send of different emails to segmented recipients all on pre-defined templates in keeping with the brand.

The Kentico system also makes it easy for marketers to send regular newsletter sends using predefined templates or the ability to load content from a specific web page. Marketing automation also facilitates the automatic send of newsletters according to a set schedule.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became law on 25 ^th May and the Kentico CMS platform is already best in class for GDPR compliance.

To achieve compliance Kentico CMS offers the following functionality for businesses:

• Right to be forgotten functionality.
• Easy integration of encryption technologies such as TDE and BitLocker for physical encryption of the Kentico database.
• Extensive documentation to support website administrators in dealing with GDPR.

The GDPR functionality also includes:

Consents - An integrated consent management tool which allows the creation of records, safe storage, updates and archive of consent.

Rights to Access - Kentico gives users a single point of access for all data.

Right to be forgotten - Allows easy compliance with any client requests to delete personal data. Through the Data Protection app, relevant data and be deleted in line with the protocol required to be GDPR compliant.

Data portability - Again, the Data Protection app can supply information in a machine-readable format. This allows data to be moved between systems for consolidation and verification and management purposes.

If GDPR is a key consideration when considering a technology partner for your next web platform, then Kentico absolutely needs to be on your shortlist.

Another feature where Kentico excels is increasing the relevance of leads and business opportunities with Kentico’s powerful built-in lead scoring capability (Contact Score).

Handling all of the lead scoring in-platform without having to talk to third parties (that’s a dream for marketers, right?), Kentico builds a picture of each visitor throughout their journey from page visits and newsletter subscription right through to product purchase, form submissions and other onsite engagement.

Your team can stay on top of leads by setting up alerts when scoring thresholds are met and surpassed, and using the Salesforce connector, integrate your sales leads straight into your CRM. Perhaps most importantly is the efficiency in delivering more qualified leads to hungry sales teams, thus wasting crucial effort further down the sales funnel.

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Transform customer experience with relevant, timely and personalised onsite content with Kentico’s built-in personalisation platform.

With some simple rule-setting you can start to deliver a richer and more tailored experience to site users. Again, this toolset negates the need for expensive third-party solutions to be integrated, so allows personalisation to be managed within the Kentico system.

The personalisation feature works across different types of websites. For example, an e-commerce website can segment users based on buying habits such as budgets, values, enthusiasts, early adopters. Or with informational websites, you may want to segment users based on needs, such as different language versions or have a preference for a key content group.

Personalising content is central to our audience-first approach at Fresh Egg, and many businesses and organisation are not yet progressing with personalisation due to its complexities – but it doesn’t have to be this way.

There’s much more to the Kentico system than these 10, 11 reasons. It’s an incredibly powerful and flexible all-in-one CMS and marketing platform packed full of features to assist lead generation and conversion – and we’re excited to offer it to our clients.

If you are considering a new web platform, then do read our Emerald Works, design and development case study.